


Consider Them Strong

by SQ (proteinscollide)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, M/M, Parent/Child Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-08-24
Updated: 2003-08-24
Packaged: 2017-11-23 05:31:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/618637
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/proteinscollide/pseuds/SQ
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lucius is a man of lessons.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Consider Them Strong

Lucius Malfoy is a man of lessons. 

**

"Bite down," he says to Draco. 

Draco stares at his father, at his father's outstretched arm, and he suppresses the urge to giggle, the ridiculousness of the moment seeping into his brain. He doesn't ask why, but he doesn't move forward either, closer to the tense tattoo of the Dark Mark. He feels a shift in the muscles by his mouth, and he makes an effort to hold his expression into a disinterested gaze directed upwards to meet Lucius' eyes. 

Lucius has a half smile on his face, and Draco knows from watching his father that his thin mouth can just as easily bend into an unnerving scowl. So slowly, he leans down and places his lips around the layer of flesh of his father's forearm, waiting for the reaction. The skin is dry and firm on the edge of his tongue, and Draco decides to mouth the area he's pressing down on. It's not something an obedient son would do. 

One lick, and he recoils, stumbles backwards. The aborted attempted at emesis leaves the sour bile on the back of his tongue and hot down his throat, but there's no mistaking the sensation before that. His father's skin tastes of rot, of fetid flesh. His father's skin is flawless and pale around the black outline. 

"Do as you are told, Draco." Lucius says calmly, and repeats his command. 

There's a sheen of saliva on his skin and Lucius uses it as a guide, holding Draco by the chin to firmly manoeuvre his son's head back to the Mark. Draco whimpers when a final wrench sounds out as a crack, the tension in his neck being released, a physiological fact he doesn't feel. He gingerly scrapes his teeth across the tattoo; he only bites down, burning tears in the corners of his eyes, when Lucius' hand tightens on the back of his neck, fingers imprinting red smears along the side. He can't move away in that vice, gagging on the dead flavour filling his mouth and inhaling the smell of his own spit. His father is hissing above him, a seething litany. 

"Our Lord demands complete obedience to his will, Draco. How will you learn to survive when his ascension is complete, son, if you cannot even follow the simplest command? You will have his mark on you one day, a sign of belonging to the true order of wizards. Don't shame me, ever." 

As Lucius talks on furiously, Draco comes to understand that the ink beneath his tongue isn't. He hears a lecture about an ancient spell, of magic that targets cells leave a completely dead area of a desired pattern. After a while, the blood that continues to be pumped through the body pools in the decaying flesh instead, staining its distinctive permanent design under the skin. 

All this lasts a few minutes at the most, and then Lucius pushes him away bodily, a choking boy kneeling by his father's leather clad feet on an elegant but faded rug. When Draco finally dares to look up Lucius has turned away from him, intent on the distant view out the window, and he is thankful is thankful for small mercies. Draco closes his tired eyes for a moment and rests his head on the floor, shaking away the last of his body's betrayal of his fear. 

**

Draco remembers a day, all the way back to the age of four; the image of Lucius strikingly solid against the sunlight too bright and splintering in all directions. He remembers watching his father removing his heavy black robe and laying it aside to stand proudly on the flat green field beside the manor. Underneath he wore a collared shirt, and as the afternoon progressed, one then two buttons were undone at the neck, the sleeves were rolled up to show the cords of muscle in his forearm, the black pattern prominent there. 

With an easy manner he threw one of Draco's favourite toys further and further, and cast a spell at the start such that it grew smaller each time the boy was successful in collecting the trinket before it hit the ground. The last time, Draco was able to cradle the silver dragon in the cupped hollow of his left palm, tiny wings of a filmy material fluttering lazily against the creases of his little fingers. His right hand clutched grimly at the polished wood of his father's new gift, a full sized Comet, with his unsuitable childish grip; thus, despite the hours of practice his flying was still unsteady, a wavering path back to his father. But he gamely hung on, and landed with just a tremble of relief in front of his father, prize still safe in his hand. 

Lucius plucked the toy from his son's hand with a proud gaze, without a word; then, a wave of his wand, and the dragon grew even smaller until it disappeared. Draco cried out in dismay - the whole day he had worked for the promise that it would be returned to him - but Lucius turned to him with a stern gaze that commanded silence from the boy. 

"Draco. It was a bagatelle, and hardly worth the tears. I could bring you another tomorrow, and take it from you just as easily as today; and I could do so until you learn not to mourn the loss of such fancies." 

There was disappointment in his father's voice, and Draco stared down at his fine leather shoes, crushed. Surprisingly, Lucius' face softened, and he reached out to stroke the side of his son's face tenderly instead. The sharp lines of his face were blurred from the film of tears Draco forgot, as he listened to his father praise him for the good effort he had made in his first lesson on a broomstick. In a voice of reward, Lucius promised more days like this, more of his time. 

Draco had shivered, shuddered, in anticipation. He doesn't remember knowing the difference then. 

**

"Mother," Draco says, sidling into his parents' suite through the heavily ornate doors. It's only been three weeks since the end of the school year, and two since his father resumed his role of teacher. He asks to see Draco every day for an hour, never at the same time two days in a row. Yesterday, he came to Draco late in the night. 

Narcissa is still dressed only in her silk robe, seated in front of her dresser of cherry stained wood. She's looking this way and that, admiring new baubles she holds up to her ears with sighs of delight. They are exquisite jewels, flashing red and silver in the mirror. Draco slouches against the wall and watches her preen. It is only after a few minutes that she grows tried of this game and turns to him. 

"Yes dear?" she ventures, voice in an affected tremble, and a smile that creases tight around her eyes. Draco stares into the blankness there and wonders if he can tell her the unvarnished truth. He begins anyway, the words emerging a-jumble, panic in his voice. 

"Mother - do you know - He - I - last night - he made - it's not - I _can't_!" 

Narcissa regards this burst of garbled speech calmly. She picks up a hairbrush, smooth and ebony-backed, midway through and runs it slowly through her hair as she replies, "Yes dear," again. 

Draco doesn't catch the presence of a question in her tone. He stares at her. She looks disinclined to say anything more, though he wills her too; she turns back to her image in the mirror instead, still unperturbed and ever as beautiful. Draco moves to leave then, hysteria subsiding to nothing but an uncomfortable burn in his chest. 

"Yes," he hears soft in the room as he walks away, feet over plush carpeting. "It's not so strange or unexpected, really." 

Draco turns back but she's not facing him, nor talking to him. She sounds as if she is trying to convince herself of some fact only she can discern. Her robe has fallen open, and as the edges slips away from each other to slide lower over her back Draco can see the broad white swathe of pampered skin, then the shock of a glaring brown scar slashed across. Narcissa is still murmuring to herself, and Draco catches, "a parting gift from _dear_ Bella." 

She smiles wryly at her reflection, and in a louder voice she says, "Yes, on the night Father announced my betrothal to Lucius." 

As Draco stares, his mother stretches up with her slender arms. The silk slides up to hide, then down again to reveal once more the badly healed skin. He treads slowly to where she remains seated, meeting her cool blue eyes in the glass as he approaches. 

"Was she jealous?" he finds himself asking out of curiosity, and Narcissa nods eagerly, pleased for an audience. 

"Oh, yes, very. She didn't want me to leave her, she was always selfish as hell. The truth was it was her marriage to Lestrange that was only months away, it would be she who was leaving me. But I wouldn't miss her, and she knew that." 

Narcissa reaches back with a deft touch, and runs her fingers over the scar as far back as she can reach. The expression on her face is dreamy as she recalls a long ago passion. Draco, intrigued, draws closer and reaches gingerly for her shoulder. His mother seems to wake up then, and she shrinks from his near touch. 

"Oh no dear, that's not for your concern," she says briskly, standing up and tying the sash tightly around her waist. "Look at the time! It's never good to keep your father waiting." 

She gives him a sly glance at this, and Draco snaps his hand back, folding his fingers into his trouser pocket. She _must_ know then, and so much more than she would ever let on. He steps aside to let her sweep past him with a bright smile, heading downstairs to late breakfast with her husband. 

In his bedroom, Draco lies on his side, cold even under quilts of finest down, and all he can hear is the murmuring tone of their cosy unbroken conversation, lazy and happy and not at all sinister. 

**

When the time comes for him to return to school, the newspapers are full of overwrought denials and planted lies, and people come and go from the Malfoy estate with quiet haste and whispers. Draco can taste inevitability in the air. It excites him like nothing else before - not the extravagant gifts from myriad relatives, not the thrill of besting every boy in the neighbourhood in broomstick races by the age of nine, not even the great fear in him. Everything is changing, a forward motion in time, and he knows some pathway in life is opening up before him. 

His father speaks yet of caution however, and orders him sternly to bide his time. He warns against mistakes, any action that would draw unwanted attention to the return of their Lord, and hinder their rise in His grace. Draco listens with a sulky glare. He chafes and strains now against the repetitive icy restraint in his father's speech, the artless ardour in his mouth left in his mouth by Lucius in a farewell unbefitting of a parent's love. 

The vacillating atmosphere at Hogwarts is no more frustrating than it is deadening. Draco creeps into the Prefect's Bathroom late most nights and thinks about his father's commands, of large smooth hands on his skin. He palms himself unashamedly to climax, nimble on himself and unrestrained, curled into a corner by the giant tub. He ignores the occasional titter from the appreciative mermaid in the frame opposite, the sound in his ears the strengthening beat of his heart as he thinks and dreams to a near, a distant, a _different_ future. Sated, he stumbles sleepily back to his bed to sleep, to a soft cocoon where he waits impatiently for the time promised a generation of boys like him with fathers like Lucius, for a more important part for him to play. 

**

Draco is learning. 

END


End file.
